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Many of us writers often complain about having to fit our writing around other mundane things, such as work, kids and spouses. Many often dream about how we could write forever if only we had the time to do it.

Well, sometimes you shouldn’t wish for something, just incase you get it.

Me? Well, I’ve just recently been informed that I’m about to be made redundant. So, I suspect I’m going to be just falling around with time on my hands in the next few months.

It didn’t come as a surprise and, being a complete control freak, I do happen to have something else lined up. However, that isn’t until September and I suspect my services are about to be unrequired by the end of June.

So, my maths suggest that I have around three months; July, August and September to make something happen other than keeping my wife happy (washing on the line, kitchen floor mopped, stairs vacuumed etc.). As it happens, that’s just the right amount of time that a certain Stephen King suggest it should take to write the first draft of a novel!

I’m looking at this as an opportunity to turn a frown upside-down and get my novel up to first draft standard.

However, I still do have some more-than-mundane plates that I need to keep spinning;

A spring-clean of the amuteforamuse blog

Keeping the amuteforamuse blog updated

Working on getting my website up and running

Completing my Creative Writing MA

Researching / studying for my new venture (more about that nearer the time)

The good news is that I’m already 85000 words into my first draft, the bad news is that I’ve not touched it in a long time. I’m feeling a mixture of panic, fear and excitement all at once, I know it will be the end of September in no time (and the time is going to pass anyway, isn’t it?) but I’m hoping to use this experience as a stepping-stone to something positive.

Like this:

After spending the first eight weeks of the course working on the core skills and techniques, it was time for the assignment.

The assigment was in two parts; participation, which was related to how active you were on the forums, discussions and workshops, and also written work which was a body of your own creative writing (4000 words) and a personal creative writing ‘manifesto’ (2000).

I had planned to write a short story for the creative writing element but, at the last moment, took a risk to update the first chapter of my novel and use that – after all it would be marked by published authors and it gave me the chance to get some excellent feedback.

The manifesto itself, which can be found here, I found quite difficult simply because I felt I had to tell someone how writing should be and I don’t have any authority to do it. The only way I could complete this was to convince myself that this manifesto was personal only to me.

All-in-all, I felt this first term was very successful for me. I learned a lot about the basics of writing and picked up some good knowledge on my own work (and others) via the use of the workspaces. The writing exercises kept me busy and the reading material was, in the main, intersting and worthwhile.

Week 8 was the culmination of the previous weeks whereby we worked on our Creative Manifesto.

Apart from the completion of the manifesto and the submission, there were some simple aims to cover the other aspects of study that we’d been doing. These included learning more about presenting manuscripts to a professional standard, continuing to provide feeback to our peers and working with our tutor to develop the final manifesto.

The writing exercise was just about polishing the manifesto and making sure it read correctly, and that there were no glaring errors in it.

In terms of reflection, I did enjoy this first term and it certainly opened my eyes up to aspects of writing that I hadn’t given a though to, especially the manifesto weeks. I discovered new ways of just starting to write, via rituals, and I also enjoyed the work spent in gathering ideas though the different mediums.

I do have to admit that I found the manifesto work quite difficult. I very much feel that creative writing is a personal action which means I find it difficult to tell people how they should do it. That’s quite ironic seeing as I’m doing a creative writing course, but I see that as someone telling me where a destination is, but then letting me choose whichever route to that destination that I prefer. Now, with a manifesto, I got the feeling that I was being asked to tell people what is wrong, and what isn’t.

Still, I did enjoy working on the manifesto and I’m glad that I completed it. I’ll get it added to a page at the top of the blog in next couple of days so people can read it and let me know what they think.

Next week, I’ll be posting the notes I made from term 2, Writing and the Self.

My wife always tells me things happen for reason, I’ve always found it good advice that has proved its value in the past on a number of occasions. It’s the thing that got me through losing my parents to cancer within a couple of months of each other, and it’s also the reason that I still felt my cup was half-full on the morning I was told my job was moving to the other end of the country. I’ve been given the option of moving or taking a redundancy settlement but balancing the loyalty I’ve given to this company for over twenty-five years against the thought of uprooting my family and driving a three-hundred mile divide between me and my children isnt a difficult decision.

I’ve been given the proverbial ‘kick-in-the-pants’ that has forced me to grab the future with both hands and finally do something that makes me happy. I’ve always wanted to be a university lecturer in either IT or Creative Writing but I know I’m still a few years away from that yet (PHD and teaching experience must come first).

The good news is that my previous studies that I undertook to further my current career has set me in good stead for a teaching career; an MSc in Computers, as well as an MA in Creative Writing (hopefully). Unfortunately, teaching in the UK has been given a rough ride in recent years and we do have a number of gaps in the industry which I hope I can do my little bit to fill.

I’ve been offline for a few weeks whilst I get a few things in order, mainly what my five year plan is going to be, whilst paying most attention to the next year or so. My daughter gave me a journal for my birthday last year. As an accomplished deputy headmistress she always has a knack for getting me gifts that she know I’ll put to good use (it’s something I like to think that I’ve passed on to her!). So, I’ve been spending my time filling in bits of this journal recently and I’m beginning to see the outlines of a plan beginning to form;

Week 7 was the final week of our work towards the end-of-term assignment; Creating a personal writing manifesto. This particular week leaned more toward discussions of other creative manifestos and had less content which allowed us to concentrate more on our own manifesto.

The weekly video was an interview with the senior curator at MIMA, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, a chap called Miguel Amado. I felt this was a very awkward interview for a number of reasons. Firstly, Miguel stated that his favourite word was black, and that he has only ever worn black clothes since he was a teenager. Furthermore, he suggested that this was an extension of his personality – something I found very difficult to understand, especially as his work in modern art must introduce him to colour on a daily basis. Secondly, I thought the manifesto discussion was very much politically biased, discussing topics such as ‘Futurismo‘, the Communist manifesto by Marx and Engels, and the Cannibalist manifesto. I have to admit this was a very deep interview; I’m not very politically motivated and, whilst I do respect his views, they aren’t something that I can relate to.

There were no keywords for this week which I found comforting as my mind had been blown to bits by the weekly video by that point.

The writing exercise for this week was a group-based exercise where we all had to come together to form a group manifesto. As with all of the workspace tasks, there is no right or wrong answer, and there is a healthy amount of respect paid to all who post in it. Due to this, I felt that our own groups manifesto was quite poor, being little more than individual statements that we posted with no-one willing to argue, nor discuss, what anyone else had written. I think we missed a great opportunity with this being so close to our assignment work.

Supporting materials pointed us in the direction of the Imagist Poets, which was a group of poets brought together as a school of images. It seemed to be quite a brief movement as critics marked it from 1908 – 1917. The rest of the reading material were references to the manfiestos that Miguel mentioned during his interview and also a look at the ways that MIMA is using localism, useful art and arte util.

As the workshop this week was the group exercise, there were no individual critiques at all. So I’m still waiting for any comments.

Weeks 6 and 7 both work together to present us with the idea of a manifesto for our writing. I have to admit that I never really thought of a writing manifesto but as the week went on, I did begin to feel like it was something I could get to grips with.

The keywords for this week included manifest, beliefs, values and voice – all quite clear attributes for a manifesto-based introduction. They helped provide the thought process that we would need to go through when thinking about a manifesto.

The content for this week did seem to ramp up quite a bit. Firstly there was the weekly video presented by our tutor, Sophie Nicholls. This was really an introduction to the manifesto topic and an explanation about the various sources we could use to view other manifestos. Ironically, we saw a simple manifesto with regards to writing which was simply ‘let go’. Whilst I could relate to this, the idea of having to write a 2,000 word one for an assignment felt a bit daunting. There was also a further video present by guest tutor, Jim Poyner, who had introduced us to his photography and his style of ‘roaming’ in a previous week.

The writing exercises were quite simple but we easily identifiable as being aimed at developing a manifesto. They were all prompts that we were expected to finish, such as ‘I believe..’, ‘I want…’, and ‘writing can…‘. There were also some more thought-provoking prompts, such as ‘what would you have written on your epitaph?’ and ‘If your manifesto had a voice, how would it speak?’.

Supporting materials were mainly website links to various manifestos but there were also a few relating to the Ars Poetica which is poem written by Horace in 19BC that advises us on the art of writing – very similar to how our manifesto could work.

My short story, Steal in the Night, didn’t make it into the workshop critique this week as there were already some works presented by others. Guess I’ll just have to wait for my turn.